Her face turned steely. “I’ll be here.” I thought that she was the bravest person I had ever seen. “I can’t stay long today, though.” I nodded, trying not to show that I minded. Even a few minutes was something, a sign that someone still remembered me and cared enough to come.

Ella passed a small loaf of sourdough bread through the grate before leaving. “Are you sure you can spare it?” I asked.

“Yes, certainly,” she replied, and I wondered if that was true. She had seemed to grow thinner over the past several weeks and I suspected she was eating less to save food for me. As the war dragged on, food was harder to come by for ordinary Poles. They no longer queued at market because there was nothing to buy anymore. Even Ella and her well-to-do stepmother were feeling the pinch now. I marveled that Ella could still find food for all of us, and I tried not to complain when it was less than it had been. After all, we had fewer mouths to feed than we once had. But it was still nowhere near enough.

The cathedral bells across the river were chiming twelve when Ella left and I started away from the grate. The chamber was oddly quiet, Pan Rosenberg hunched over his prayer book in the corner. I did not see Saul. He must have gone for water, I realized. I wished that I had run into him in the tunnel, so that we could have shared a few quiet moments alone together.

Bubbe lay in the bed on the Rosenbergs’ side of the chamber. She had not gotten up that morning and I had tiptoed around to prepare breakfast so as not to wake her. Her confusion had worsened to delirium the past few days and she had remained on her pallet in the far corner of the chamber, moaning and mumbling to herself nonstop. Sometimes when her suffering noises became too loud, I could not help but think that they brought just as much danger as my baby sister’s cries once had.

I had tried to speak with Saul about her a few days earlier, when her deteriorating condition was impossible to ignore any longer. “Bubbe,” I’d said, stating the obvious. “She isn’t well.” He had nodded in acknowledgment. “Do you have any idea what it might be?”

“It’s a kind of dementia,” he said. “Her father had it as well. There’s nothing to be done.”

I had moved closer, wanting to comfort him. “I’m so sorry.”

“She was always such a smart, funny lady,” he said, and I tried to picture the grandmother that he described, who had been largely gone by the time we had come to the sewer. “This illness, it’s crueler in some ways than a physical disease.” I nodded. Dementia had robbed Bubbe of herself.

Now Bubbe lay silent and still. The bowl of gruel I had tried to coax upon her that morning sat beside her, untouched. It seemed odd that at noon she was still asleep. I moved closer to check on her, hoping she had not caught another one of the fevers that seemed to bedevil only her, worsening her condition. I put my hand on her forehead to check if she was hot. To my surprise, her skin was cool. I noticed then that she lay in an odd position, her face fixed in an almost smile.